An eternity of silence settles over the meadow.
Glassheart can feel Cordis’ body folding in on itself under her touch. She’s recoiling without moving even an inch, and it feels like earthquakes - like the world around them rattles, breaks, and splits. This shouldn’t feel so huge, a stranger meeting another stranger, but it feels like there is nothing more colossal in this world and the next.
And when at last the silence ends, she says: “Dont…”
Nearly pleads it, and something inside of Glass suddenly recognizes their closeness as strange. Of course it’s too much. Of course it would be strange for Cordis. It was strange enough for her, too, and she’d had months to come to terms with the idea that something about her was not wrong, but different. The truth is that in this moment, in her own body, she feels like the intruder.
“Of course,” she apologizes, reeling backwards to place distance between their skin.
Even if it hurts her to do so.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
And then her eyes roll backwards and close.
(They’re standing there at the ends of the earth, and both would go further if the other only asked her to.
The willow is still slanted. The river still spills out into a violent ocean. Spyndle stands across her bones not knowing at first that they are her own, that this is what ghosts do (they come back). Static and gold, Spyndle is flickering softly as the ends of her hair wisp out into the frost and fog, and her dark, wildfire eyes seem vacuous and omniscient all at once. Cordis is all bright light, a beacon like the first time, but this time she’s too late.
If you listen closely you’ll hear the quiet thump of two hearts in her chest.
The clouds of their breath are tangled; the vapours find and fall into one another, again and again and again, and it only serves as an agonizing reminder of what cannot be. Of what will never be again, of a touch once made up of electricity lost into the abyss.
“You found me,” says Spyndle.
“Of course,” says Cordis. “I have your heart.”
Spyndle isn’t crying, she isn’t capable of it in this form, but she sees the tears on Cordis’ cheek and wonders silently if her heart is aching in her lovers ribs now. If it were really hers it would be, and she doesn’t envy Cordis for carrying the weight of it now; her heart has always been a burden.
“I missed you,” Cordis says, but just as she does the wind rolls out across the water and Spyndle falls away like ash. Her mouth had parted as though she meant to speak just before, but she fell to dust before the words ever came.)
When the memory ends she takes a moment to collect herself. She hears a voice in her head, and she counts to three to settle herself. She opens her eyes then, because hot tears are welling up in them and stinging. If Cordis had her heart, too, she's sure that she would hear it breaking.
“I’ll find a way to come back to you,” Glassheart offers, weakly.
“That’s what she was trying to say the last time.”
Maybe they would always come back to each other.
Maybe just not always in the ways that they’d expect.
Glassheart
i'll always love you the most
@[Cordis]